Policy makers are the doctors of health systems. They are the ones who, when faced with difficult diagnoses – such as inequalities in service access, human resource shortages, poor health outcomes, emerging diseases – select the interventions they believe will restore the patient’s (system’s) health, and oversee adherence to treatment (implementation). They are the individuals and collectives with the power to influence health on a population level. And the power to limit the opportunities of entire countries with poor decisions and inadequate service planning.

Unfortunately for policy makers, however, they are not in the privileged position of today’s doctors, with a vast array of well-researched treatments for the myriad common diseases that burden their patients. The policy makers’ toolkit is limited to the blunt instruments of budgeting, national goal setting, and guideline development. Diagnoses are equally unsubtle: high burdens of disease, low life expectancy, and catastrophic health expenditure, to name just a few.

Systems’ “medicine” is languishing in a time akin to the era when doctors could do nothing for their patients but barbaric surgeries, blood-letting, and doling out reassuring words. If health systems are going to deliver on the population health benefits that should result from medical innovations and advances, this has to change.

Health systems research has much potential to be the science that policy makers depend on to inform their professional decision-making, just as medical science is to doctors. Unfortunately, however, the field does not currently fill this need. But maybe it should.

One response to “Health systems research should be to policy makers what medical research is to doctors. Unfortunately, it is not”

I wonder if health policy makers and managers appreciate the place of health systems research and Operations research in the national policy advisory system (where such exists) in my part of the world. To what extent do research findings contribute towards health policy decisions in the real developing world? Unfortunately political considerations may be a more tangible contributory to health policy decisions, especially in some developing countries with adversarial multiparty democracies. Decisions on health system funding is also firmly in the hands of politicians who determine the health budget. The bigger question will be ” What proportion of available health budget will policy makers commit to health systems research to generate information that they will be willing to use”?